I own the first (at least I think so) version of Amazon Kindle. It has a function called “text to speech” which does what is says – it reads book for you, somewhat mechanically. I think it is because it reads word by word, and that sounds “robotic” and not at all natural. It misses feel, punctuation, flow of normal read.

Add to this the following theory: if we will have endless number of monkey hammering randomly on some typewriter, we are bound to find one which will write some coherent book.

Finally, Amazon’s “Alexa” comes to picture. As far as I know, Alexa listens to everything that happens in its vicinity. Well, Mr. Bezos, I think that you already know what I am about to say: from all that Alexa listens to you are bound to find sentences fitting a book where the flow is right (money principle from above). You can even find whole books read by parents to their children. Get those, give it Alexa’s voice and voila – you have your text to speech pretty much for free. And it will be much better than the old one.